Southern California Airports Impacted For Short Time Friday

If you were trying to get away for the Memorial Day Weekend from or to any of 21 Southern California airports Friday, an hour-long disruption at a San Diego-based radar center may have had you squirming in your seat for a half hour or more.

The computer mapping system used by TRACON, the San Diego-based radar center used to guide flights for 21 airports in the region, failed for about an hour when staff attempted to update the maps early Friday, FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said, reported the Associated Press.

"We were installing new maps in the radar system and something went wrong and all of them suddenly disappeared from the radar screens," Gregor said. "Controllers could still see the aircraft and could still talk to the aircraft, but they couldn't see the maps."

Said Tony Vella of the Air Traffic Controllers Association, working without the computer maps is "like going down the freeway with no lines or guardrails."

The problem started at 5:34 am and fixed around 6:30 am. Gregor said there were about 100 departure delays at airports in the region. Two of the busiest airports in the region, LAX and Lindbergh Field in San Diego had 37 and 29 departure delays, respectively.

Gregor did not have figures on arrival delays. However, during the one-hour outage, the FAA grounded every flight in the western US headed for Southern California, he said.

"Everything's back up and running but they're all playing catch-up," said spokeswoman for Lindbergh Field, Sharie Shipley, on Friday. "It's probably going to take all day to work through the backlog."

At Orange County's John Wayne Airport, spokeswoman Rachel Gibson said, "By the time they had called me, everything was already sunning smoothly; there was not that much of an impact at all."

Try selling that to passengers in the terminals or on their flights sitting on the tarmac or at the gate.

During the outage, a backup system in Palmdale safely guided three flights to landings within the region -- the world's largest airspace, covering 21 airports from Ventura County to San Diego. All flights that had not taken off were delayed an average of 24 minutes, although LAX saw delays up to 46 minutes.

FMI: www.faa.gov, http://sct.natca.net